Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 54

The adoption of horses by Indians required large cultural changes. As they turned this new organism to their own use, they also changed their cultures and their ways of interacting with nature. A common misconception is that horses “ran wild” for the most part, and that some of these might have been caught and tamed by Indians, who otherwise had no horses unless they stole them from their enemies. Although some Indians did specialize in catching wild horses, and horse theft was a common way of gaining new animals, breeding horses from Indian herds was also widespread. In fact, the propagation of the horse throughout the Americas came about in part because Indians developed ways of breeding and rearing horses. In Montana, horses could not survive the winters without Indian caretakers to feed them and provide minimal shelter. In the 1950s, anthropologist John C. Ewers investigated traditions of horsecraft among the Blackfoot Indians of the northern Great Plains. Many of the men he interviewed were Piegan, a sub-tribe of the once-powerful Blackfoot Confederacy. Some of them had known the great horse trainers, horse catchers, and horse doctors of the 1850s–70s. What steps did Blackfoot horsemen take to differentiate their horses from their neighbors’ animals? How did they control horse breeding to maintain the best horse lines in their possession?

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(Reprinted from The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1955.)